Wind is something all of us feel on a daily basis, but few consider a natural resource. It is actually an excellent resource because it provides the opportunity to capture the energy from wind and transform it into clean, renewable power for people to use. Wind can be classified by scale, speed, cause or the regions where they occur.

The causes of wind can be classified by the following:
• Gradient Wind-Caused by air moving from areas of high pressure to low pressure regions
• Geostrophic Wind-Caused by the Coriolis Effect and the natural rotation of the Earth
• Thermal Wind-Caused by the uneven heating between the equator and the poles


A diagram of gradient wind, showing how the pressure change creates wind.
Image provided by: http://www.physicalgeography.net/

Wind is also split up into four different types depending on the scale. Those types are:
• Prevailing Winds-Natural circulation of warm and cool air in the atmosphere
• Synoptic Winds-Large scale warm and cold fronts seen in normal weather
• Mesoscale Winds-On a smaller scale, but more intense, brought on by storms
• Microscale Winds-Last only a minute or two, are the smallest scale, cause dust devils

When listening to the weather channel, you frequently hear terms like, “A northerly wind front”. This direction is from where the wind originates. In this case the wind is moving from North to the South. Wind is measured in many ways, such as by an Anemometer which reads the speed of the wind, to a weathervane which measures direction, to the commonly referred to Doppler radar that measures the light reflected off molecules, which is directly related to the wind velocity. Wind is also often measured using the Beaufort wind scale, which uses descriptions to report the intensity.